Wyatt Earp – blu-ray movie review

This is one of the best, and underrated, westerns ever made. It was a very intense, interesting character study of a famous lawman, showing flaws and all. In fact, this is the only version, I believe, that really shows the sadistic side of Wyatt Earp, and what made him a bitter man. To be fair, it also shows his good traits.

Unlike other adaptations of the same subject (namely, Kurt Russell's Earp in 'Tombstone'), this film deals with the famous gunfight as merely a step in Earp's life. Rather, the film focuses on the man behind the legend. To do this, it looks at Earp's life in two stages: his life before, and after, a major transition.

Hollywood's version of history is considerably at variance with the facts, and life on the frontier in the 19th century would appear to have been more dull and monotonous than exciting and colorful… Certainly, life in Tombstone, Arizona, in its time of greatest prosperity as a mining town must have been anything but healthy, with its vast number of rough working men relieving their boredom with drinking and brawling, and occasionally shooting each other…

In Kasdan's epic Western, Earp is the upright defender of the law, and Doc, a dissolute gambler… Nevertheless, the men are compassionate and respectful, and both have a kind of dignity… Holliday is much more credible as the black sheep of an aristocratic Virginia family and a jaded idealist… Dennis Quaid allowed himself to lose 30 pounds of his weight only to accurately portray the gun-notorious Doc Holliday, now, alas devoted to the bottle and in the latter stages of tuberculosis…

The cast is pretty good and also pretty deep. Costner may not be seen as a star anymore but that doesn't mean he can't act and can't hold the attention. He is a reasonable Wyatt but he suffers from being too deliberate and too shut off at times. I understand he needed to do it for the character but it contributes to the film feeling slow. The other brothers are played well by Madsen, Ashby and Andrews. Maybe it is because of Costner's drab Wyatt, but Quaid really lightens things up as Doc Holliday. His colourful character stands out easily against the old west types. The support cast is deep and includes faces such as Hackman, Fahey, Harmon, Pullman, Sizemore, Rossellini, Williams and O'Hara.

Despite its occasional longueurs, in its latter stages (which deal with the post-Gunfight spiral of revenge between the Earp and Clanton gangs, with Wyatt's happy second marriage to the beautiful Josie and with his final promotion to legendary status) the film achieves a similar epic grandeur to that of "Dances with Wolves", aided by those familiar features of the large-scale Western, sweeping photography of the scenery and a stirring musical score. One of the better modern Westerns

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